Got my copy of The Hobbit yesterday. I had Best Buy do a price match from Walmart for 18.96 fir the BluRay, Dvd and Ultraviolet Combo pack. And I had $5 in Best Buy Rewards. Nice. Plus a special online preview event this Sunday with Peter Jackson for The Desolation of Smaug.

blackjack68 wrote:Got my copy of The Hobbit yesterday. I had Best Buy do a price match from Walmart for 18.96 fir the BluRay, Dvd and Ultraviolet Combo pack. And I had $5 in Best Buy Rewards. Nice. Plus a special online preview event this Sunday with Peter Jackson for The Desolation of Smaug.

I'll wait for the extended version. I actually didn't make it to the theater to see this and I'm kind of bummed. I really wanted to see the 48fps version and so I'm hoping it is rereleased right before part 2 comes out.

Will you use the DVD or digital copies of the movies? I feel like everything is including those now. I understand why a 3D movie might include a 2D bluray (the 3D version is mastered brighter to compensate for the dim glasses) and I get that many families have DVD players in cars or in kids play areas, but I'd rather they saved the buck on the extra stuff. I'll make my own digital streaming copies with Plex.

eddysnake wrote:Zero Dark Thirty was awesome. only downside is movie is 2.5 hours and has to cover 10 years of story. It's done well, but I could have easily sat here for 3+ hours watching more, it was that good. Someone was saying earlier that they were already filming this before the got Bin Laden, anyone know how they were originally going to end the movie before that happened?

here you go ed:

Bigelow and Boal were just a few months away from shooting the previous film — about the near-miss pursuit of bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001 — when the world’s most-wanted man was discovered and killed in a compound in Pakistan last year. They quickly decided to set aside the finished script and start over on a new movie, which eventually became Zero Dark Thirty (that film opens in limited release on Dec. 19). “I love reporting, so being on a big story is really exciting to me,” says former war journalist Boal of his scramble to write a new script. “But nobody likes to throw out two years of work.”

eddysnake wrote:Zero Dark Thirty was awesome. only downside is movie is 2.5 hours and has to cover 10 years of story. It's done well, but I could have easily sat here for 3+ hours watching more, it was that good. Someone was saying earlier that they were already filming this before the got Bin Laden, anyone know how they were originally going to end the movie before that happened?

here you go ed:

Bigelow and Boal were just a few months away from shooting the previous film — about the near-miss pursuit of bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001 — when the world’s most-wanted man was discovered and killed in a compound in Pakistan last year. They quickly decided to set aside the finished script and start over on a new movie, which eventually became Zero Dark Thirty (that film opens in limited release on Dec. 19). “I love reporting, so being on a big story is really exciting to me,” says former war journalist Boal of his scramble to write a new script. “But nobody likes to throw out two years of work.”

eddysnake wrote:Zero Dark Thirty was awesome. only downside is movie is 2.5 hours and has to cover 10 years of story. It's done well, but I could have easily sat here for 3+ hours watching more, it was that good. Someone was saying earlier that they were already filming this before the got Bin Laden, anyone know how they were originally going to end the movie before that happened?

here you go ed:

Bigelow and Boal were just a few months away from shooting the previous film — about the near-miss pursuit of bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001 — when the world’s most-wanted man was discovered and killed in a compound in Pakistan last year. They quickly decided to set aside the finished script and start over on a new movie, which eventually became Zero Dark Thirty (that film opens in limited release on Dec. 19). “I love reporting, so being on a big story is really exciting to me,” says former war journalist Boal of his scramble to write a new script. “But nobody likes to throw out two years of work.”

eddysnake wrote:Zero Dark Thirty was awesome. only downside is movie is 2.5 hours and has to cover 10 years of story. It's done well, but I could have easily sat here for 3+ hours watching more, it was that good. Someone was saying earlier that they were already filming this before the got Bin Laden, anyone know how they were originally going to end the movie before that happened?

here you go ed:

Bigelow and Boal were just a few months away from shooting the previous film — about the near-miss pursuit of bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001 — when the world’s most-wanted man was discovered and killed in a compound in Pakistan last year. They quickly decided to set aside the finished script and start over on a new movie, which eventually became Zero Dark Thirty (that film opens in limited release on Dec. 19). “I love reporting, so being on a big story is really exciting to me,” says former war journalist Boal of his scramble to write a new script. “But nobody likes to throw out two years of work.”

Hollywood didn't like the torture scenes and didn't want to give the Best Director/Picture to a woman again. That's the scuttlebutt.

I don't agree with it at all, but that's what the rumormongers were saying.

I enjoyed Argo, but like I mentioned elsewhere, I felt this it was like this year's Shakespeare in Love - better films (Life is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan, Elizabeth, and Thin Red Line) lost the political race behind the Academy Awards.

Apparently Lincoln faced some political backlash too for portraying some southern representatives as in favor of slavery before switching over, when they were opposed to it in first place, or something.

That with Afleck's director snub, pretty much sealed it for Argo. I mean, Argo inexplicably won best adapted screenplay over Lincoln -- that alone tells you how much it fell out of favor.

Reginald Wayne "Reggie" Miller, this month's TCM Guest Programmer, is currently known as an outspoken commentator on National Basketball Association games for Turner Sports on TNT. Before that Miller was an outstanding star of the NBA, enjoying an 18-year-career with the Indiana Pacers. Especially celebrated for his precision shooting, notably against the New York Knicks, Miller held the career record for most three-point field goals at the time of his retirement.

Reginald Wayne "Reggie" Miller, this month's TCM Guest Programmer, is currently known as an outspoken commentator on National Basketball Association games for Turner Sports on TNT. Before that Miller was an outstanding star of the NBA, enjoying an 18-year-career with the Indiana Pacers. Especially celebrated for his precision shooting, notably against the New York Knicks, Miller held the career record for most three-point field goals at the time of his retirement.

TCM-HD has found itself in the crosshairs of some a/v circles. Very very little of their programming consists of HD masters - they are simply running SD programming through an MPEG2 encoder and creating 1080i prints of the work. Even films that have had bluray releases are not being show that way. Think of it like taking a DVD rip and telling Handbrake to make you a 1080p mkv file.

When Casablanca was on last month for the 31 Days of Oscar festival I recorded it. I checked the media info on the file and found it to have an average bitrate of about 8Mbit, which is the amount of data on a good DVD. The Bluray and HD-DVD releases have been over twice that and even most HD channels clock in around 15-18Mbit.

There's been a bit of speculation as to the why of it. Their channel is 1080i, so everything going through it is going to be "1080." One idea is that they don't have the exclusive rights to show a movie in HD in the US. While their channel is broadcasting 1080, their source is 480. Another is that their equipment forbids it - that they actually downconvert HD masters to 480 and then back up to 1080 for broadcast.